First Do No Harm
by Alinyaalethia
Summary: 'Faith did not come home; she went across the Atlantic as a V.A.D.' A glimpse at Faith's war.
1. Chapter 1

_The characters in this story, are, as ever, the property of L. M. Montgomery. Those who are not hers are inspired by her._

 _This story too owes its existence to Katherine-with-a-K, who prior to Christmas expressed the wish to see something of Faith's war in Pieces of Lives. This is neither a chapter in that story, nor, I suspect, the story she expected; it is, however, the one that ambushed me. Hopefully it fills a gap while I scrabble to get the end of Pieces of Lives_ _in order. With thanks ever for reading -Alinya_

* * *

Gangrene smelled sweet. Not in the way sugar was sweet, but in that cloying, sticky-sweet way that over-ripe fruit was sweet. It made Faith think of Rainbow Valley and the hot summers when they had hoarded illicit peaches from Abner Crawford's orchards, only to be discovered when the sun blacked them and the flies came flocking in clouds. It was the memory, she said when she woke up, not the sight of the flesh of Private McDonald rotted from toe to femur that had made her faint. She had expected the rot; the memory of the peaches overlaying it had cut her somewhere vital. She had said this to Lili when she was still only Lilian, moon-pale and waifish, but sweet. Sweet the way treacle candy was sweet, Faith discovered to her relief, on waking to the scrutiny of those too-big eyes, blue or trying to be. Nursing regalia made Lili look bleached of colour, as if she had been sat too long in the sun when in fact it was the height of a greyly English winter and no one could remember what the sun looked like. They couldn't dilute the sweetness of Lili though, that was bone-deep, which was probably why Faith had yielded up the memory of the peaches in the summer sun, how they had stolen them from Abner Crawford ('They?' Lili had asked, thus necessitating an enumerating of Blythes and Merediths that would have made a biblical scribe proud), feasted on them in Rainbow Valley ('Where?' Eliciting a description of Shellean proportions), how afterwards, sick from their spoils they had stowed them at the root of the White Ladywith no thought for the severity of a Canadian summer until the flies appeared to swarm riotously around the peaches' ruin. Lili had grimaced in sympathy, her hand squeezing Faith's. It was only then that they traded names, Faith with the same reckless abandon with which she had offered it to the Blythes all those years ago, Lili gingerly, because she knew already what Faith learned only as the war went on –that names were sacred, the thing that when all else had passed away, preserved that last vestige of the self.

That had been a long time ago; now Faith stood casually debating over the leg of one Private Anderson while simultaneously she kept Lili from fainting. There was no saving the leg; the question was whether to amputate below or above the knee. Cutting it below would be better for mobility, but the black tendrils of gangrene encroached visibly on the skin, the sign of red, angry infection discernible as vines under the knee-cap.

'It will have to be above, I think,' Faith said with real apology to Anderson and across his body, the doctor nodded approval. Beside her, Lili had gone what Norman Douglas would have called cheese-coloured and wavered dangerously. Faith didn't blame her –suspected she was white herself. The mangled specimen of a soldier in front of them was more boy than man, barely 18, if Faith were guessing, and bloody lucky to have come out of Reims with his life. He reminded her horribly, painfully of Carl, except that Anderson's eyes were the green of ripe limes, not the blue of Carl's eyes, a mercy for which she thanked God, because she didn't think she could have taken off the leg of a boy with Carl's eyes.

'Why don't you fetch boiling water, Lili-flower?' Faith said, striving to reassure both of them. Doctor Christopherson was fingering bone saws now, judging which was best to purpose.

'Linen too.'

'I hate to ask,' said Doctor Christopherson, 'but would you mind…' He made a gesture half apology, half distaste, nodding in the direction of their patient.

'I'll hold him, of course,' said Faith moving behind the table and taking Anderson's shoulders firm in both hands, hiding a smile in her collar. Dr. Christoperson might have spent four years at the front ministering to the dying but he still apologised compulsively to his nurses for the ugliness of the work they had signed on to do. Now he said, as he always said before an operation, 'It's not really a lass's work. I'm sorry.' It was their ritual, the superstitious rite that brought them safely through the ordeal of the moment. Like the sweetness of gangrene, it was a gesture that conjured home, Dr Blythe and Jem, and that weird feeling of temporal dislocation came back to her. Then Lili was there with the water and Faith looked down into the face of Anderson. She had used to close her eyes; that was in the early days when gangrene smelled of rotting peaches and made her homesick as nothing else could. Then had come the mess that was the Somme, the ensuing chaos and the nameless lieutenant who had died in her arms. It was only afterwards, as she drafted an account of his death to be sent to People Who Mattered that she realised she had no name for him.

'Something with an F,' Lili had said when asked. Faith, who had felt his life ebb out of him like water could think only of the lark on the badge marking him out as Canadian, a Quebecer, _Je te plumarai_ the motto of his squadron.

'It's going to be all right?' said Anderson now as the bone saw came down, and Faith, who had never been much good at lying convincingly, smiled and said, 'Right as rain.'

It wasn't _un_ true Faith consoled herself as the shudder of the bone saw reverberated down her arms, the impact jarring her shoulders. The gangrenous limb removed he would be well out of this moil, and that was something to the good. Green eyes spasmed wide and watery in agony, and not for the first time Faith cursed the ill luck that had seen the anaesthetic exploded into bloody pieces. It _would_ be. That was the great risk of ether. Nothing so flammable. Also finicky to use. Less so stovain or novicain, both things that would have been welcomed now. The trouble was that she couldn't remember the last time she'd had access to either. England, Faith thought. And still, it could have been so much worse.

She watched upside-down as the fish-mouth incision appeared in his leg. That was good. Another, smaller incision into the muscle tissue. Lili pinned the skin carefully, exposing the muscle and bone, and their little world began to fill with the hot smells of iron and innards. Still good.

'All right?' she said to Anderson and he grunted through the leather he was biting. _Think good things_ she counselled herself in the face of this desperate attempt at stoicism. They could be like the anaesthetic, blown into non-existence or about to be. There was another shudder, and another, the body of Anderson twitching under constraint as he was jarred by the rending of limb from body. A juddering like a stone skimming water and then nothing. Anderson looked up at her with a look of such naked terror that Faith squeezed his shoulders and said, 'All right,' but of course it wasn't. Transecting the femur was difficult at the best of times. Trying to do so on a wakeful patient was doomed to be nothing less than fraught. With half an eye Faith took in the spectacle of the surgery, Lili with her clips and cautorising iron, Dr. Christopherson with the bone saw, all as it should be. Except…the iron tang of blood flooded Faith's nose. Had a muscle slipped too far? Snagged too near the bone? She couldn't tell from behind Anderson's prone shoulders. The nothing came again, an echo like iron that passed from Anderson's mangled leg all the way through to Faith's hands on his shoulders. She dared to look away from his bloodless face to Dr. Christopherson.

'Jesus, God,' said Faith softly over the nothing sound of the bone saw. It was stuck deep in the leg, teeth half-visible and bloody in the light of the tent.

'Thought…'said Anderson through his teeth 'minister's daughter… you said.'

'It isn't swearing if it's meant as a prayer,' said Faith, which improbably won her smiles from all of them, Dr. Christopherson, Lili and Anderson. From his perch on the table Anderson gave a grunt of could have been agreement, amusement or agony. Faith thought it was probably all three, but mostly agony.

'We used to get into all sorts of scrapes,' she said to take his mind off of the proceedings inasmuch as that was possible. 'We were very imperfect minister's children.' Not for the first time she thought of Nan and the ease with which she wove her economies out of thin air and felt a pang. She was no storyteller herself, but she supposed she could ramble on about the Manse, Maywater and Rainbow Valley until the worst of it was over. No, she couldn't. The scream of the bone saw came again, brutally shattering this imagining.

'Lili,' she said as evenly as she could with the weight of the bone saw shocking its way into her arms, 'I need you to…'It was easier to reach for Lili and pull her by the wrist, to install her behind the table in Faith's place.

Lili opened her mouth to protest but Faith anticipated her.

'You've _got_ to,' she said, her hands folding tight over the bone saw. They would risk the muscles, she thought, go slowly. It was the best they could do; to leave a wakeful Anderson unrestrained would be to butcher him still further. Bent over the exposed tissue and bone of the knee the smells of infection, blood and that gangrenous smell of rotted peaches were stronger than ever. In front of her Dr. Christopherson nodded and they leaned hard on the bone saw.

There was an awful, screaming wrench and it came free with their combined exertion. Then the whine and rasp as it began again, and Faith thought about closing her eyes against the ragged edge of the bone unravelling before her. Then she thought of the dead lieutenant whose name she had lost and changed her mind. The air was heavy with the smell of spoiled peaches, the coppery smell of blood and innards. Below her hands puss oozed yellowly and viscous from the wound; she was going to choke on the miasma of it if she didn't die of exhaustion first. Her nerves were protesting with the effort demanded by the bone saw. But the femur was thicker than she'd imagined, and the saw ground on, _needs must_ , she supposed, and then, perversely, as if in counterpoint, rose up the breathless thread of someone singing, high and thready, _aloutte, gentille alloutte…_ _It's never Anderson,_ thought Faith, and of course it wasn't. Lili, with sweat running in rivets down her forehead, lips compressed with effort, was sending little snatches of song into the world, because she hadn't family to tell stories about or places held sacred, or any more facility with comforting lies than had Faith. _Je te plumerai le tête…_ Good Lord, children's nursery rhymes were brutal, and so was the world. Was that why they had made those rhymes so grim, Faith wondered over the snick of the bone saw? So that when Hell opened its mouth to swallow those children whole they would know what to expect? _Alouette, Alouette,_ from Lili, not feet away but a whole other universe so far as Faith was concerned. At least the lark was _dead_ before it began to be mutilated.

'Jesus God,' said Anderson around the much-abused piece of leather. No one contested the prayerfulness of the sentiment.

Her arms were going numb with the effort of helping to manipulate the bone saw, and still Anderson's leg lay before her, not quite in pieces. A piece of skin had slipped its pin –forced free when the saw unstuck, Faith supposed –and now flapped fragile and delicate before her eyes, making Faith glad it was Dr. Christopherson at the helm of the operation. They needed another pair of hands to pin it back, but that meant moving Lili from the wracked body of Anderson and to do that was to let him flounder as crazily as the flap of skin in the saw's path, which itself meant botching this operation still further. Always supposing that was possible. _Alouette, gentille alouette…_

Just as Faith thought she could manage no more, that her arms would fall off in a tremor of exhausted defeat, the leg came free and there was only the bloody gleam of bone and muscle to contend with.

'No time for stitches,' said Dr. Christopherson.

'No, of course,' said Faith, with a look back at Anderson's face. He was white of course –blood loss or shock, she wondered, or both? She favoured the last diagnosis herself. She reached for the abandonned cauterising iron, and was relieved to see Dr. Christopherson too had gone white, this bastion of stalwart order, last embodiment of the old world here among the mess and the mire. _Not really a lass's work_ , but he didn't say it now as he clipped away the worst of the ragged edges and Faith held the iron to the wound for him. The sweet stench of the gangrene mixed with the searing smell of scorching flesh.

'Oh God,' said Faith the smell of it scoring her nostrils and making her eyes run.

'I thought,' began Lili, her delicate eyebrows disappearing into her forehead.

'If a minister's daughter can't invoke her maker,' said Faith, striving for wryness, 'I don't know who can.' What she didn't say was that she would never eat peaches again.

Later, much later, she drew it, the dry-powder smell of charcoal mercifully eclipsing that of the rotted peaches, of the gangrene. Drew the agonised look of Anderson as he bit down on the leather, Lili's hands on his shoulders, anchoring him to the world. She caught the ragged flap of untethered skin, the dread moment when the bone saw came free.

A rush of warmth, the shifting of the weight of the bed, and then the shock of the operation's lingering smell as Lili set her pointed chin on Faith's acromion to squint at the result.

'You make it look beautiful,' she said, wonderingly.

'But it is,' said Faith, 'life always is. It's why I'm here.'


	2. Chapter 2

_I swithered for a while about adding to this story, and I still haven't decided if there's a continuous narrative to be had here, or so many disparate one-shots with overlapping characters. But I've had this chapter of Faith's story sitting on the computer for a while and am finally brave enough to send it out to be read. Two things are worth noting; I am no doctor and while I squinted at diagrams until they were without form and void, the odds are I have got something wrong. If so it isn't for want of trying to get them right. The second, of course, is that the characters and world belong, as ever to L. M. Montgomery. The idea only is mine._

* * *

The boys came in stumbling bloody, battered, and beaming.

'Don't worry, Miss,' said the taller of the two when Faith caught his eye, ' 'S not all our blood.'

'I should hope not,' said Faith and looked critically between them, trying to decide where to begin. They struck her as nothing so much as one conglomerate injury. Divining so much from her glance, the boy who had spoken inclined his head towards his friend.

'Look at Mac first,' he said over Mac's protestations. 'He took a bullet to the stomach…or roundabout there.'

'But you…'said the boy called Mac, 'you…'he trailed off, his words one indeterminate whimper.

'I'll do,' said his friend with conviction, 'I'll do.' So saying he dropped Mac unceremoniously onto the bed nearest Faith and sat himself down in a chair close by. 'I'll do fine. But Miss, you must look at him.'

'Yes,' said Faith, 'I suppose I'd better.'

She began to fuss with the buttons to Mac's uniform but to no effect. The wool was heavy with blood and stuck to his skin. In the end Faith took scissors to it, the fabric coming away with a sodden, sucking sound, little fibers adhering stubbornly to his flesh.

'Bloody stubborn man,' she said half to herself, 'what stunt were you pulling to cause a mess like this?'

She began to probe around the hole the bullet had left, and then slid her fingers under his side to feel along his back for the exit wound. There wasn't one.

'Will he be all right Miss?' said the boy who had brought him in. He had not stopped staring since Faith began her examination. Now she smiled at him and said, 'He'll do just fine.' Having made up her mind on this front she allowed herself to spare a glance at his uniform. Was there more blood on it than there had been? Impossible to say. The light was imperfect and they had been so blood smeared when they came in that it would have been easy to overlook him. Her attention had been all for the obviously injured Mac, after all. Sensing her looking he shrugged clumsily.

'Some of it's his,' he said. Faith narrowed her eyes at him, even as she glanced to see if there was a nurse to be had with time spare. There wasn't. The dead and wounded were legion, Dr Christopherson was extracting shrapnel from the back of a patient, Lili embroiled in what looked an especially delicate surgery. Everyone had work to do, this was hers, and that being the case Faith found herself forced to take the boy's word for it about the blood and refocused her attention on Mac.

'You're in luck,' she said. 'Better drivers than I got ether through the line the other day and we haven't run out yet. You'll go to sleep for a bit and when you wake up, the worst should be over.'

'Dunno about that,' said Mac groggily as she began to measure out the ether. 'Reckon we'll win the war while I'm 'sleep, do you?'

'Bloody stubborn man,' Faith said again. 'I suppose you think you'll go straight back out there.'

'Thassaboutri',' said Mac as the ether seeped through him. He went slack and then still. In the chair, the other boy gave a cry of terror and lurched forward in his seat, painfully to judge from the set of his mouth.

'Is he dead?'

'No,' said Faith. 'Alive as you like. In a minute I'll see what I can't do to mend him up for you.'

Distrustful of the distillery smell of the ether she donned a mask and bent over Mac's prone body, index and middle fingers pressed to his carotid artery as she counted the beats of his pulse. It was slow, but not unduly so. Faith thought she had…well not a lot of time, likely, but enough to clean Mac up and rid him of bullets at least. In an ideal world there would be someone to keep an eye on the ether, but they were up to their eyes in wounded and dying and ideals had got lost somewhere back in…where? The Somme? Vimy? Paschendale? It was difficult to say when exactly they had thrown up their collective hands, though certainly it had happened before Faith had arrived overseas. By the time she had arrived the air was practically pregnant with the sense of do-the-best-as-best-you-can. Gently she cut away the worst of the skin surrounding the bullet wound to make space for operating, and extracted the residual pieces of fibre from among Mac's injury. No point in leaving it open to infection. Besides, if it was a souvenir he was after he could have the bullet. Mask notwithstanding her nose filled sharply with the sweet, tarry smell of carbolic lotion as she scrubbed first her hands and then the wound with it. Her skin was slippery with it, so that she hardly noticed the slick feel of Mac's organs as her fingers wove between them probing cautiously for the bullet, telling his bones as she went. She found it among the spleen, fingers skittering across the hardness of its shell among the soft folds of muscle and tissue. As she retracted her hands and rinsed them again, Faith felt more than saw Mac's friend's eyes widen in horror as she picked up a pair of forceps and began an excavation.

'You're never telling me,' she said, voice muffled by the mask, 'you haven't seen worse than this before.'

'It's different…when it's someone you know.' It was at that; Faith thought of the spring afternoon she had mended Mara's arm after an encounter with some new-fangled garden tool and was disinclined to argue the point. That had been at Redmond, in her Swallowgate days, the air heavy with the smell of new greenery and blossom, and while she could still recall vividly the compulsion that had drawn her to help, she recalled in no less detail the dread awe of holding the well-being of someone she cared for in her very fingertips. Now Faith glanced over her shoulder at the sound of the boy's voice; his protestations to the contrary _something_ was obviously causing him pain and was –yes –the blood on his uniform was practically black. It hadn't been at last look. Some part of him was evidently weeping blood grievously. _Exsanguination_ , the technical word Faith supposed, and someone ought to do something about it. _She_ ought to. He was sitting not half a foot away, close enough that she could all but taste the iron of the blood as it amassed on his uniform. But there wasn't time for that now. The longer Mac was under the ether the more worried she was that he mightn't wake up and the more likely the wound could take infection. Faith redoubled her focus on the job at hand; find the bullet, extract the bullet, pack the wound and dress it. It sounded like a perverse rope rhyme for skipping to when she put it like that. Forceps in hand she began to renegotiate the structures of Mac's abdomen, her brain slowing as it ever did when she operated until it had relaxed almost as much as Mac's pulse under the ether, matching it beat for somnolent beat. The distinction between nurse and patient bled away, her hands little more than a mobile piece of the abdominal cavity as she eased forceps between organs. There was the stomach, soft and limp with ether, unblemished by bullet fire. She paused a moment to get her bearings and felt his pulse slow and turgid from the ether as it beat through the abdominal artery. This, Faith had often imagined, was what the biblical writers had really meant when they talked about becoming one flesh, the seamless join of two consciousnesses as they cleaved to life. Her hands darted between the ribs and back into the spleen, such a little, easily overlooked piece of the body, and all the while she was acutely aware of the shifting pressure of Mac's body around her as it strove to fend off the invasive forceps. There was more blood than she would have liked; it coated the organ tissue and decked her hands and the bullet as she tried to coax it free of the protective membrane overlaying the spleen. _Visceral peritoneum_ , thought Faith, seeing Jem's battered textbooks in her mind's eye. Then devoutly, because she wasn't sure she had the resources to combat a damaged spleen alone, _Thank God for that_. She didn't have enough hands as it was. Blood continued to well, obscuring her vision and making the organs still more slippery.

'Come here,' said Faith to the blood-soaked boy in the chair, because she had no one else. 'Hold the skin for me, will you? Just there.' She nodded in the direction of Mac's abdomen, and although his companion was managing to look green and white at once, he complied. _Definitely bleeding_ , thought Faith as she watched him, kneeling beside the bed, broad hands splayed gingerly around the flesh of the bullet's entry. What she said was, 'Just like that. Good.'

With all the reverence of a minister raising the host, she drew the bullet out and set it on the nearby table among the needles, clamps and other medical impedimenta.

'He can have it for a souvenir,' she said to her transfixed assistant. He was white as Henry Warren's ghost had once been, _definitely_ not normal.

'It looks awful small,' he said doubtfully. 'You sure that's all of it?'

'Absolutely certain. They're destructive things, aren't they, for such little scraps of metal?'

He gave a grunt of agreement and tried ineffectually to wipe the blood now coating his hands on his knees, then stumbled back into his chair and sunk into it gratefully Belatedly he said, 'You can manage all right now, Miss?'

Faith, rubbing her hands raw with carbolic lotion to clean them, smiled reassurance at him and began to tear strips of gauze for wound dressing. She dipped those too in the carbolic mixture and the smell mixed unpleasantly with the sticky sweetness of the ether, but at least it wasn't rationed. Still in that strange, semi-somnolent place born of operating she packed the wound tight and then wound Mac's middle in several layers of the now-carbolic gauze for good measure. It took mere minutes, which seemed incongruous given the sheer amount of blood that had glistened on her hands. _Like seas incarnadine_ , Faith thought wryly, as with no little relief she stoppered the ether and took off her own mask, holding her breath as she stared at Mac's chest and counted the seconds. _One…two…three…_

'Miss? Is he all right?' And then Mac's chest began to rise and Faith let out the breath she had been holding.

'Good as new,' said Faith. As if to prove it, Mac sat up too quickly, and was promptly sick. Then he pressed a hand over the thickness of the bandages, probing at them with curious fingers.

'Doctor, were you?' Faith asked, with a thought for Jem, 'before coming over here?'

'Good Lord no,' said Mac thickly. 'No…it was just like you said though, Miss. I was 'sleep…and then it was over. Still hurts like the dickens though. '

'It may do for a while,' said Faith apologetically. 'That was a nasty scrape. I've done the best I can over it but we're not miracle workers.'

'I guess you're not far short though,' said Mac. Faith handed him a glass of water and he sipped at it cautiously, still fuzzy, no doubt, from the ether.

'Now you'll have to have a look at Inness over there. I guess he's been making light, 's if nothing happened?'

'Well…' said Faith, unsure if she should be relieved or alarmed by the accuracy of her private diagnosis.

'Only a scratch,' said Inness, 'didn't I tell you?'

'Guess it can't hurt to have it seen too,' said Mac, swinging his legs over the side of the bed in direct contradiction of Faith's orders. She couldn't really blame him. There wasn't a vacant bed and if Inness did need attention…It was too little, too late. She knew that the moment Mac was at his friend's side. Out of the chair Inness folded like a house of cards, pulling the spindly Mac to his knees along with him.

'You bloody stubborn man,' said Faith as she prised his shirt away from his back. 'What in the name of God where you thinking?' He was past talking, but that didn't matter. Like a flash of lightening the answer leapt into her brain, _I was keeping him alive_ , and she knew it because it was exactly the kind of daft, idiotic, _noble_ stunt Jem would pull. She only hoped that any nurses Jem ever confronted were quicker off the mark than she had been.

'Will he be all right?' said Mac, but it was obvious from the way he cradled his friend's head in his hands that he knew the answer. The uniform finally separated from its owner, Faith could see the entrance wound of the bullet, just inches below the kidneys. No wonder he had looked half white with agony not long ago. Of all the slow and horrible ways to die…and she could do nothing. Dimly Faith thought of the ether, of just letting it drip and drip…it would be like falling asleep. But there wasn't only Inness to consider. Other patients were going to come in, with no less grievous injuries and would she let them suffer because she had been too cowardly to let this man die of a wound she couldn't treat? No, she couldn't see her way to it. Inness looked at her face and knew it too. That was the worst of not being able to lie convincingly. People got to _see_ what it was you would shield them from. But then, if anyone had a right to know he was doomed, surely it was this brave, idiotic boy with a look of floury whiteness about him.

He was half-delirious with the pain of it by then, the lines of his suffering stamped plainly across his face. He began to babble gently, almost incoherently. Faith's ears prickled at the half-familiar sound. Where had she heard it before?

'Tell me,' she said to Inness 'Have you got a name? More than a last name, I mean.'

He gave a gurgle that might have been anything and Faith did her best to decipher it. ' _Awry_ ,' he seemed to be saying, ' _Aw-ry_.'

'Laurie?' she asked Mac, very doubtful, the name sitting strangely on her tongue.

'Sawny,' he amended.

'Sawny,' Faith echoed. 'Of course. For Alexander?' A murmur of assent from Mac and another bubble of incomprehensible hurt from the boy called Sawny. He really did look young, lying there on the floor, his head on Mac's knees. He couldn't be much older than she was herself, and his eyes –they opened wide in unspeakable hurt and she saw they were black like Jerry's.

'I haven't heard that in years,' said Faith reminiscently, 'not since we lived at Maywater.' He was still jabbering fretfully, Mac at a loss as to what to say to him. And then from among the babble came a word Faith knew, had heard Mara use any number of times in exasperation over all sorts of mundane grievances, the fire not starting, the stove smoking, an essay that wouldn't write.

 _'_ _A Dhia_ ,' from the lips of the dying Sawny and suddenly Faith understood why it was that his fretful attempts at speech had buzzed so infuriatingly close to the edge of her understanding. She thought of Mara and Poppy back at Swallowgate whispering late into the evening, the low murmur of their voices as they shaped the words of their heritage and clawed frantically for her old facility with languages as she tried to fit the Gaelic into her own mouth.

'There _a charaid,_ ' she said softly. 'You'll be well soon.'

Two pairs of eyes flashed with gratitude, Mac's wetly; Sawny's black and fierce over the pain of his death-throes. He tried to summon words to answer her but they came out a guttural moan.

'Don't suppose there's a chaplain nearby?' asked Mac as he rocked Sawny's head in his hands. There wasn't. It wasn't his day to visit. But Mac wasn't wrong, they owed the boy in his arms _something_ and how could Faith possibly tell him that on top of the agony and the slow-burning rending of life from soul that he was going to die without even a ceremony to mark it?

'I'm a minister's daughter,' said Faith. 'Would that do?' She didn't feel it, not then with her hands brushing the lines from Sawny's forehead, helpless in the face of his dying, and her voice sounded dubious even to her ears. No one else appeared to notice.

'That it would,' said Mac with such sincerity that it cut like a scalpel into Faith's chest and would have brought her to her knees had she not already been on them. Perversely, as she knelt on the ground with her hands on Sawny's forehead the only prayer that would come was an old one of Mara's for the burial of the animals that Pilgrim, that great cat of Swallowgate, killed and mangled, and ate. She would never manage the Gaelic –she had barely even a light touch of it as it was –but she thought she had heard Poppy's whispered translation often enough to run to it. After all, Faith thought with a look at the dying Sawny, you wouldn't let an animal die like this if you could help it.

' _O Lord_ ,' she began falteringly, ' _bless the blood and the flesh of this the Creature that you gave me…_ ' It didn't feel quite right, but opposite her Mac was nodding, and when she turned her head so was Dr. Christopherson. When he had appeared behind her Faith didn't know, she knew only that she was suddenly, achingly grateful to him for being there.

' _Life for life_ ,' he said with her, easing the prayer along. He joined her and Mac on his knees at the head of her former patient, his hand on the crown of Sawny's head as though in benediction.

'… _That me and mine might give you thanks for Your own Sacrifice of blood and flesh…_ ' It was a little thing of a prayer, and yet he was dead even before Faith reached the end. Gingerly she brought her hands to his eyes and eased them closed. Dr. Christopherson rustled in his pocket and came up with two pennies. 'For his eyes,' he said, offering them to Faith. She did as he instructed while he folded the weeping Mac into a hug.

Only afterwards, when they had bundled him back into bed, for shock as much as for his still-healing abdomen, did Dr. Christopherson turn to her and say with a smile in his voice, 'I had no idea you had the _Gàidhlig_ ' He gave it it's full old-word pronunciation and Faith smiled in spite of herself.

'I haven't,' she said. 'I only know someone who has.'

'Well you made his last moments contented ones,' said Dr. Christopherson. He said it with such disarming warmth that tears prickled at Faith's eyes, and it was all so absurd, because she hadn't even known the lad's name until he was all but dead. And of course if she had only insisted…had looked at him sooner...She must actually have articulated some of this because as Dr. Christopherson pulled her into a hug he said with mock severity, 'I'll not have you dwelling on might-have-beens. You played a bad hand as well as anyone could, and that's no little thing.'

Faith breathed in deeply through her mouth. Her forehead was pressed against the chestpiece of Dr. Christopherson's stethoscope and he smelled of the hard-packed earth, of alcohol rinse and blood, rich and coppery. It brought back the memory of Jem after a long evening helping Dr. Blythe in the surgery and Faith almost smiled.

'If that's true,' she said, 'then why in God's name does it hurt so much?'

'Well…' Dr Christopherson seemed to consider this as he guided her to a chair and sat her down. He rootled about for tea to offer her but of course there wasn't any to hand. This being the case he fumbled among the recesses of his jacket and came up with a flask, which he handed to Faith. Uncapped it smelled disconcertingly like the ether and she was reluctant to touch it. But Dr. Christopherson nodded at her and under his watchful eye Faith gulped it swiftly, the liquid burning the back of her throat and searing her nostrils so that she coughed. She expected him to laugh, but he only hit her on the back as she choked, and when the spasm had passed she felt the rich warmth of it like so many tongues of fire lining her stomach and unknotting the tribulations of the day.

'Thank you,' said Faith, offering him a watery smile. He took the flask back, sipped at it himself, and said on consideration, 'It's a contract, isn't it? The patients come in and you promise them at the start that you're going to put it right. And then you can't, or you do but it's not enough, or something goes wrong along the way, or maybe it's just beyond fixing…whatever the reason you've broken that promise. Now strictly speaking that's not what happened. But however you look at it and whatever anyone says, that's how it's going to _feel_. And the terrible thing, I'm afraid, is that it doesn't matter how many lives you save, it will always feel that way when you lose one. But you can't believe it, you mustn't, because there will be someone else. There's always someone else, and you owe it to them to stop them dying too.'

Even as he spoke Faith could hear the sound of a fresh wave of patients arriving, the rustle of the stretchers against the canvas of the door, the heavy tread of dragging feet, the groaning and moaning of the injured. There wasn't room, of course, but they would make it somehow, eke it out of corners and residual floor space as best they could. With difficulty she tamped down the rawness of the death of Alexander Inness and went out to meet the onslaught.

'I'm afraid,' began Dr. Christopherson weakly, and this time when Faith smiled there was heart in it. Perhaps it _wasn't_ a lass's work in some other, bygone world, but this was now, and there was a job to do, and she must do it.


	3. Chapter 3

_I am still no doctor, the characters still belong to L. M. Montgomery. The anecdote about the Christmas sermon, however, owes entirely to a minister of my acquaintance. It really did happen and it's hardly the weirdest sermon I've had cause to hear. Really. And as ever, love and gratitude to all of you reading and/or reviewing this oddity of a story._

* * *

Once, in a world without a war, the Rev. Meredith had preached a Christmas sermon that began with a warning about what would happen if flies were allowed to breed continuously for six months, unchecked by nature. It had been inspired by something Carl had said in the heyday of his fixation on the devilish menaces, and had been, Faith now suspected, designed to illustrate a point about the commercial teeth the Christmas Story had acquired. It wasn't Christmas, and God knew the last time there had been ways and means of exchanging the glittering gifts of her childhood Christmases but all the same, Faith thought of her father and his sermon, and the mountain of flies he had described now. She couldn't be sure, of course, but she thought this must be something like the way that would look. Nothing though, no Christmas sermon in the world could have prepared her for the sound of a million flies buzzing. It was like nothing on earth.

At first, before Faith could see them, she had taken it for the low drone of a bagpipe because it jarred her bones in the same way. It wasn't keening though, there was no waiting for that kick like a mule's that sent the pipes out-of-tune and into full-throttled wailing that came with bagpipes. Then she had thought it might be the ambulance's engine, preparing to betray her in the worst way possible, leave them stranded with the dead and the dying, half-drowning in the mud. Only then did she _see_ them, a black haze like a raincloud –at first she thought it _was_ a raincloud – low and lowering. It wasn't until Faith was in the thick of it, felt them crawling over her skin, the pinch of their bite on her neck, that she made sense of them for what they were, the flies her father had once anticipated, an apocalyptic warning no one had thought to look for.

In the beginning she couldn't move for them. No one could. They flew at all orifices, getting into eyes, nostrils, ears. She opened her mouth in denunciation of them, swallowed one and, her efforts failing to dislodge it, kept her mouth pressed tight closed after that. There were worse things in the world though than flies, hurts worse than the sting of their teeth, and after that first moment she came unstuck, they all did, and began to press forward.

It took another moment to realise they flies couldn't be relied upon to tell the dead from the living. The blood had drawn them, the smell of it hot on the air, cloying in its coppery richness, and it was everywhere. Lili had once likened it to licking a penny, but deep in the heart of the battle line, amid the wash of mud and blood it struck Faith as more like blood pudding before it had been fried. Another thing she was never going to eat as and when the war came to an end, she supposed.

She found Cecil because she quite literally tripped over him. She had been squinting against the flies when her foot connected with his sternum. Afterwards Faith would say that even had she not been squinting she would have missed him but for her feet because he was half-submerged in the mud and the half that wasn't was so bloodied and grimed as to all but blend into the landscape. When she did see him, Faith supposed him dead. She knelt down thinking to close his eyes, maybe chase the worst of the flies from his face, and had she never done it she would never have heard the wet whistle of his breathing over those thousand thousand flies. It too sounded like nothing on earth; not quite the last gasp of a dying thing nor the reedy whisper of the wind in autumn, but fragile and laboured at once, and nothing like the sound that came of a punctured lung. Stifling her distaste for insects, Faith edged a hand towards his throat, wanting to make sure the damage wasn't there. That startled the flies and they flew up in a hoard, which was how she came to see the ruin of his face. Her first thought was _he has no nose_ , which made no sense because everyone was born with a nose. Her second thought was _He's broken his nose_ , because that took account of its shapelessness and the blood both. It wasn't until she moved her hand across his face that she thought _septal hematoma_ , and by then the list of injuries had mounted so high that Faith barely took it into account. By this time one of the flies had regained its nerve and alighted on her hand. She felt the prickle of its feet dancing across her fingers and her spine went cold in response but that too scarcely registered. She was busy tallying the injuries to Cecil's face; _jaw shattered, teeth loose –five, one broken –bloodshot eyes –lacrimal bone probably fractured, facial trauma –severe…_ and of course, the broken nose, septal hematoma, and God only knew what else. It was like looking at the Punch of a _Punch and Judy_ performance, except that even Punch had a nose and was designed to effect laughter; Faith looked at Cecil and thought she was holding the world together with both hands. She thought Cecil probably knew the feeling.

Needing to start somewhere, Faith rootled among her things, found carbolic lotion and, because she was reluctant to waste time on cutting bandages, a handkerchief Una had embossed for her back in the years when bizarre Christmas sermons were their chiefest anxieties and began to sponge the blood away from his eyes.

'This will sting a little,' she said as she worked, though it hardly seemed necessary. After the hell he must have gone through carbolic lotion was surely the least of his problems. Even so it elicited something that Faith thought was trying to be a smile. His mouth couldn't quite manage it –she blamed the broken maxilla – but his eyes crinkled involuntarily and then spasmed like trembling aspens in a gale when this proved painful.

'Lie still,' said Faith, then carefully spat a fly out of her mouth over the shoulder furthest from him. 'It'll go easier all round that way.'

The handkerchief, never designed with efficacy in mind, was sopping. Faith stuffed it back into her sleeve and dug into her bag for bandages. Her instruction had been to use them sparingly, to do what she could to ready patients for transportation away from the battlefield and the men could be treated properly. No one appeared to have taken injuries this extensive into consideration. This was beyond choice. Faith folded a wadge of bandage into a sizeable square and uncorked the carbolic lotion again. At least the alcohol smell of it cut the richness of the blood a little. It was beginning, in conjunction with the sun, to give her a headache. Such a little thing, thought Faith, as she pressed the bandage to his face and began to sponge the blood away. A headache she could bear. What she couldn't see her way to was mending the damage of his face. Whole swathes of skin seemed to have come away leaving it pulpy and raw to the touch, which didn't help at all with the butcher-shop impression of their surroundings. And then there was the nose –surely beyond reconstruction. Even if it _could_ be done –a sizeable if in Faith's book –the odds were his family wouldn't know him to look at him. Not at first anyway. Perhaps after those eyes, no longer red with blood, crinkled at the corners… _but why not_ , Faith thought suddenly as she tested the edge of his loose teeth with an index finger. Was _anyone_ going to be recognisable to family when they finally came home? Would she be? Somehow, Faith rather suspected not, and with new resolve began to fish the shards of broken tooth out of his mouth. No point on him choking on them before he could be seen to and treated properly. He must be having trouble enough breathing as it was.

She found his name engraved on a medallion as she did her best to reset his jaw. She had thought at first it was only severed from his hard palate, and blamed it for the damage to his nose and eyes. But her probing found part of the bone snagged behind his left ear and she knew at once it was worse than that. With effort she shifted what bone hadn't shattered into realignment, the gritting and grinding of it of it competing contrapuntally with the drone of the flies and setting her teeth on edge. It was made all the harder by his wakefulness, the look on his face that said he might have tried to scream if he could have made his mouth cooperate. The work needed doing though and as Faith fought with the intractability of bone her efforts turned up his collar. That was how she found the medallion, and she would have overlooked it save as a conversation point if she hadn't by then learned to see with her fingers. As it was the pad of her thumb felt the depression of that first letter soft in the metal, round and curved, _C_. She needed a fresh bandage by then anyway, so while one hand unravelled a new swatch of cotton the other traced the shape of the letters and for a moment her heart misgave her because it was her mother's name, Faith was sure of it…only that made no sense. She paused, cut the bandage and as she soaked it in lotion retraced the inscription; _Cecil._ Not _Cecilia_ then, of course not. It was the heat and her head and her wishful thinking, not to mention the bloody flies. Another one had found its nerve and now circled her head droning mindlessly as it weighed up the best place to bight her.

She had to do something about his nose, Faith thought, one hand still holding his jaw in place. If she didn't the bone would likely die and much good that would do him. She also needed a third hand. Possibly a fourth. Ideally another person entirely but that wasn't how excursions like this went. They had to scatter, the better to salvage as many of the wounded as possible, and oh but the wounded were legion. She needed to set his jaw. And see to his nose. And somehow get him out of the mud and back to the ambulance, please Go let her be able to find it through the haze of heat and flies and the dizzying smell of blood.

The fly that had been circling her found the sweet spot behind her ear and nipped. Unaccountably that decided Faith and having already given up on sparing bandages she cradled Cecil's head awkwardly in one arm and bound it as tight as she could manage in a roll of bandage. It wasn't much, but away from the flies and the blood she could worry about knitting the bones back together. Now she needed to do something about his nose while she still could.

The bore needle was elusive in and among her things, the book it lived in having slipped into the furthermost corner of the case.

'My sister,' she said to Cecil by way of apology, 'is the one with a taste for sewing.' But then she smiled and said, 'You're in luck though; that's not what needs doing.' Quick as a flash she had pierced the septum, and just like that there was more blood spurting its way across his face.

'That's good though,' she told him as she dabbed at it, 'that's much better.'

His eyes crinkled again, and then replicated the storm-rattled aspens again for good measure.

It was all she could do from the field. They mended him later, sat close under a pool of kerosene lamps and candlelight and put him to rights, beginning with the jaw. There was ether, sweet-smelling and treacherous, but no flies to assail the blood on his face.

'Can you do it,' asked Dr. Christohperson of Faith, and when her eyes rounded in incredulity, he added, 'your hands are right for it.'

So she took the splintered bones in hand and guided and coaxed them, and marvelled at how much easier this was on a patient asleep, when her vision wasn't clouded with flies and the mud slimy against her knees. It would never look _right_ , of course, jaws rarely did after they had broken even once, Jem had told her that, eons ago. But to break repeatedly…it should have been unthinkable, the violence unimaginable. And yet. Faith splinted bones and where they had shattered irreparably did her best to knit what was left back together, Lili ever at her elbow with sutures, carbolic rinse, catgut.

It was Lili that swaddled his face in bandage, the best they could do against the trauma there, layers soaked in a healthy dose of alcohol against infection.

It took the three of them to reset Cecil's nose, to reassemble and bind the pieces of it until he had a hope of breathing some way other than through his mouth. Until it looked almost like a nose again. Blood made the cartilage slippery, even elusive, and its tendency towards repeated collapse made splinting the nostrils difficult. It took the web of their many fingers and what Faith privately suspected might be so much bloody-minded determination on their parts to make it happen. It was worth it though for the relief that struck her sharp between the ribs when that fraught, laboured whistle finally eased under their hands, his breathing quieted.

Later still, much later, when the trauma was less and the bones safely encased in plaster, Faith came to change the dressings on his face and found him awake, his hand tracing the contours of his face, from jawline to splinted nose.

'Jesus,' he said and grimaced, 'how bad is it?'

 _Not at all_ stuck somewhere between larynx and soft palate. She could never have said it convincingly in any case. There weren't words enough. Without thinking to do it, Faith's hand dipped into the recess of her apron pocket and came up with a compact Jem had given her back when the war was nothing more than a short-lived game of especially violent chess, due to end Christmas of 1914. _Because_ , the note accompanying it had run, _you should always be surrounded by niceties –especially now, darling_. Faith had never thought to ask how he found it, hadn't wanted to. The thought that he had either seen it in some shop window either while training in England or later, away on leave for a spell and put it aside for her unsettled her stomach in a way not dissimilar to the smell of ether, because it was so unlike the impulsive Jem that had courted her in the days of The Harbour Light, when her latest grievance had been the indictment against minsters' children dancing. That Jem would have presented her with it at once, greedy to see the effect of his present, the look on her face as she traced the design of tiger lilies stamped over the gold plate.

Now she handed it over to Cecil, catch sprung to save him fumbling with it, helped him tilt it towards his face.

'Jesus,' he said again as he closed the compact. From the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes, Faith half expected tears as she closed her fingers once more over the weave of tiger lilies. But then he blinked once, twice, three times in rapid succession and said, 'Would you know? If you'd seen me before, would you know me?'

Faith, who hadn't seen him before the flies and the mud felt her words solidify in her throat. 'I don't think,' she said carefully, 'any of us would know ourselves now if we had run across them before. A lifetime seems to have passed since then.'

Cecil appeared to take this under consideration, one hand still compulsively relearning the map of his face.

'The thing is,' he said slowly, gingerly, 'if I'm not what I was when I was born, and I'm not the person I became…what does that make me?'

'Yourself,' said Faith, surprising herself as much as him in her promptness. She tapped a finger against the crossroad between his sternum and breastbone and said, 'That intractable spark, the thing that gives us all our hopes and frailties, that doesn't change, whatever else does.'

'Thought lots about it, have you?' said Cecil, and there was a smile in his voice if his mouth couldn't quite manage one yet.

'No,' said Faith. 'One of the hazards of growing up a minister's daughter; you hear a lot about what other people think about things. You sort of end up a magpie to thoughts, collecting all the best ones and sticking them together. But that one…that makes sense to me. If we were only blood and bone and flesh, I don't suppose it would matter so much what happened to it, to us. But we're more than that, people are finely wrought and haunting, complex things. We love and dream and bruise in places no doctor can do anything about…and yet somehow, those are the things we fight to preserve, I think. Do you see? Not the shape, but the core of a person, the tether that anchors body to soul, so that a person can go on loving and wanting and even grieving –so they can live, I suppose I mean.'

'I see,' said Cecil. Then, the smile warm in his voice again, he said, 'I dunno much about it, but I guess the world's cheated itself of a fine minister, keeping the women at arm's length and all that.'

That made Faith laugh. 'No,' she said, the laughter past, 'no, that I could never do. Nursing though...now I wonder how I ever did anything else.'


	4. Chapter 4

In long after years Faith would still insist he should never have been there. It was that more than anything else, that reminded her of Jem, that caused her to see him for a moment and not Gregory lying there among the mud when Dr Christopherson first called her over. And yet if it came to that, they all reminded her of Jem; none more so than the bright-eyed, brave lads that persisted in the belief this was all one grand lark. Also the ones that woke sobbing in the aftermath of a hard operation or slipped quiet and elusive from between her fingers, souls feathery fly-away things. They were all Jem, not because she imagined Jem to have given up or even died, but because she liked –needed –to think that if for some unfathomable reason it _were_ Jem weeping or dying, there would be a nurse on hand to give him due attention, to send a prayer on after him. In the meantime though Jem was missing and Matthew Gregory –so said the name sewn into his collar – reminded her particularly of Jem.

It was the way he lay, hands clamped around the sluiced leg of his comrade that did it. It spoke to an old story of Jem's, one he had told her as they walked out to what was to prove the last dance of her girlhood, that idyll of Before the War. They were walking out to the Harbour Light and Jem had been full of a story of a doctor who went around the battlefield mending his fellows, and ultimately dying for them, for the work. It was impossible not to think of it now, looking at Gregory, his face white with death-pallor and his breath gurgling ominously. Of course he had been a doctor in the Before days, or training for one.

Dr Christopherson thought so too, actually asked, and only then did Faith see the dog collar he had made a tourniquet of on the arm of the boy he shielded, and had shaken her head at him, _no_. Not a doctor then, but a setter of souls. He should never have been there. She must have said it aloud, because he raised his head with effort from the pillow of the other boy's abdomen and said, 'Neither should you.'

It was so very like Dr Christopherson's _it's not really a lass's work_ of old –though he said it less and less of late, Faith had noticed –that she couldn't help but smile, even as she took stock of the injuries between them.

'Hardly the same,' she said, thinking, _severed brachial artery, injuries to leg muscles; gluteus maximus, superficial likely, vastus medialis, severe_ …

'Someone,' Gregory said, as Faith hunted his patient's pulse, 'has to see them safe.'

'Of course,' still counting the beats of the prone boy's heart. It was slow and drugged in pace, but she thought between the dog-collar tourniquet and the pressure to the lad's leg, Gregory had largely saved him. There were the usual nicks and scrapes, of course, but nothing a few neat stitches wouldn't see to. He'd been lucky Gregory found him.

Gregory was still gurgling though, and rocking back onto her heels, Faith turned her attention to him. The mud made a soft, sucking motion as she shifted her weight, her fingers taking stock of a clammy wetness inches above the sternum.

'Have you found it?' This from Dr Christopherson, who must have discovered it already, a circular puncture perhaps the size of a shilling and cold to the touch. Everything about Gregory was cold. His lips, she noticed, had begun to acquire a faint blue tinge. His fingers had it too when she looked. A fine milky blue at the base of the nailbed like yesterday's milk. Notwithstanding the clamminess of the mud at her knees, Faith unclasped her own cape and bundled Gregory clumsily into it. Anything to lessen the awful bone-deep chill of him. It was a little thing, but if she could lessen the shock a little then perhaps…

Absently she accepted the stethoscope handed her by Dr Christopherson, and began moving it across Gregory's chest, and felt the cold seep into her for her trouble. It wasn't the absence of the cape that did it so much as the sound of his breathing magnified, a wet sucking together of the lungs, followed by a burbling reminiscent of a fountain. It was all so _wrong_ , and they had so little time. Under the tent, perhaps, with ether and light and space, but _here_ …

'What happened?' Faith asked. What she meant, what she would have demanded of Jem, was _what were you doing_.

'It was all over,' said Gregory. He coughed and a stray bubble of blood came free of his lungs and seeped from the corner of his mouth. Dr Christopherson reached into his coat and surfaced a handkerchief that he took to Gregory's face. Gregory smiled thanks, and said thickly, 'It was all over…and I went out to see.' They must have looked incredulous, because he smiled at them and said, 'It's what I always do afterward. Like I said to you, someone has to see them safe. 'Cept Hector…he wasn't dead.'

'A friend of yours, was he?' Dr Christopherson wanted to know. A look of exquisite pain that not even the blood and the punctured lung, or the cold could account for, washed over Gregory's face, surpassing even the deathly white of it. 'That's why…'he said, voice quavery, 'when I saw he wasn't dead…' he gestured clumsily at the improvised tourniquet above the boy's –Hector Faith supposed she must think of him now –arm. 'There wasn't anything to do it properly,' offered like an apology to this jury of nurse and doctor before him.

'You did well,' said Faith, squeezing his shoulder. With effort, he nodded. 'I was tying it,' nodding again at the dog collar, 'when the shot came. They had mostly stopped, see, but there was so much confusion…just time for…no one would notice one more, I guess they thought. What difference would it make? I thought…I thought it might really kill him, I could hear the whistle of it that close. I couldn't move him though, on account of the mud…'

Gregory's breathing, which had grown increasingly laboured, went out of him in a sudden _whoosh_ of air.

'You turned round,' said Dr Christopherson. Gregory nodded. 'To see him safe. It was supposed to be all over. Don't you see?'

Faith thought the better question was how anyone could help seeing, and thought of Jem –wherever he now was –with a vengeance. Except it wasn't quite the same. Jem, for all his talk of larks and adventures, must have expected the barrel of the blast, the brimstone smell of shells and the cold, clammy mud. When you were saying last rites over the dead, Faith thought, you hardly expected to join them in a heartbeat. Or perhaps Gregory had. Faith looked again at his face, whey-coloured, save for a pair of brown eyes like polished conkers, and the milky blue of his lips, and saw he had anticipated her question, or perhaps read it in the etching of her own face. He would have had perhaps seconds, she thought, to turn and make a shield of himself like that –had he known it would be the death of him? More blood bubbled at the base of his nose, and as he wordlessly accepted the handkerchief from Dr Christopherson, Faith found herself ambushed by a stray piece of Isiah she would have supposed, if asked, she had long ago forgotten; _like a sheep that before its shearers is mute_ , in her father's rich, warm cadence _, so he opened not his mouth_. Only Gregory couldn't help opening his mouth now, he was all but breathing through it, gasping and fighting for air like one of the trout Jem had wrestled from the water in olden days, or more lately, plucked by Mara out of the brook near Swallowgate.

Whoever the catcher, she remembered, they had always killed the fish outright. It was all you could do, Jem had once said, after snaring them by the roof of the mouth, a kindness really. Perhaps he had only meant to lessen her horror at the time. If he had meant to shock her, it hadn't taken. It should not have surprised her then, the faint snick of a gun being cocked at close quarters, and yet somehow, even here among the mud and blood, it caught her off-guard, like a well-aimed punch to the solar plexus.

Gregory, head still cushioned on Hector's abdomen, only blinked faintly in acceptance of the gun levelled close to his heart.

'Is it very bad then?'

'It's very slow,' said Dr Christopherson with apology. 'Drowning like this. But not so slow that we could do anything, did we move you. You see?'

'I see. You'd have to have prayers ready, you mean, by the time you got to wherever we're going?'

'Something like that,' said Dr Christopherson, and Faith knew in her gut that he was right as he said it. Swiftly, mentally she took stock of the damage to him, this brave, lion-hearted boy who should never have been there. There was the punctured lung, and the blood that was choking him, and by now no doubt he was beginning to be starved for oxygen. She watched him fighting for breath and knew this was so in some unspeakably deep-rooted part of herself. Even had they had all the time in the world, he would still never be right. Oxygen was one of those things a person needed, like love or language. Without it, deprived of it, the body withered and floundered.

'You'd better do it then,' said Gregory to Dr Christopherson. 'Please. I'd rather…it be quick.'

He reminded her terrifyingly of Jem. Perhaps that was why Faith folded one carbolic-scrubbed hand into his mud-grimed one and pressed the other to his forehead as though in benediction. Then there was a noise like a sap kernel bursting into a fire, reminiscent of any number of Swallowgate fires by starlight, and a shudder passed through Gregory's body in a ripple. Behind him the boy, Hector's eyes went wide in startlement, the first sign he'd given yet of registering their presence. And then there was only the smoke of the gun, and the lingering acrid scent of burning, and great calm. Not even the birds dared sing. ' _Greater love_ ,' murmured Faith as she eased his eyes closed, ' _hath no man than this; that he lay down his life for a friend_.' Then, turning to Dr Christopherson, 'I didn't think we could.'

'In a civilised world?' he said, turning it deftly into a question as he wrapped Faith in his coat –there was no reclaiming her cape now and they both knew it –'we wouldn't dream of it. But then, you know, in a civilised world, we wouldn't have to either. But here…here we have no choice. When it's a question of going in agony, or gently into the night, then we have Hippocrates on our side. For among doctors,' and here he conjured a smile for her, 'the greatest commandment is this: First do no harm.'


	5. Chapter 5

_I'm always grateful for those of you who review, but especially so to those of you who come back again and again to this story. I know I don't update it with anything like timeliness. After this there's only two chapters left, one of them already finalised. So perhaps, if we all cross our fingers, you may get more than one chapter in normal order._

 _And thank you even if you're only reading - this has never been an easy story to write, much less read I should think. Thank you for sticking with it, for checking up on it time and again._

* * *

'Please, Miss,' said the boy in the tent frame, and as ever, it was the 'Miss' that decided her. In England, Faith recalled foggily, she had been 'Sister' unfailingly. They all had been – there was nothing particularly familial or even important about it, except that they had had to be called _something_. But here, the niceties of society had long ago got lost among so much else, which was why Faith came to be looking at the young boy's hands, as per the request of his friend, thinking of the inscription over the Manse fireplace; _Sic Transit Gloria Mundi_ , all because this boy had looked at her and called her 'Miss,' as if she were still the Glen schoolteacher.

Unnecessarily, he said, 'It's his hands, Miss,' which Faith could see fine. What she had never seen before was anything like the devastation of these hands; bones stuck out of fingers at impossible angles, this one shattered, that one only protruding. They were of necessity curled into claws, and Faith held them in her own hands, one bloody, tattered fist at a time, and wondered aloud at what could possibly have caused the ruin. She had heard, of course – they had all heard – of clipping a finger in the name of going home. This wasn't that. It was as if the world had fallen on Atlas and brutalised his hands in the process.

'What were you _doing_?' she said, more curious than censorious. Gingerly she felt her way along the bones of his right hand. The boy made hissed, but offered no more substantive answer. He only blinked blankly at her, more confusion, Faith thought, than pain, though God knew he must be feeling enough of that too.

Lili had crept over to her sometime during the inspection, wide-eyed and mute, smelling faintly still of the operation she had closed with, carbolic lotion and blood. Faith had meant to ask her what their supply stock looked like. Lili, ever one for interpretive conversation took this another way, and reiterated the original question in French – minus both Faith's imperfect accent and her gentle incredulity, as if this boy were someone's Jem, plus unplumbable patience. Neither the French nor the patience progressed them a jot. Warily, Faith reached for Italian that was months out of practice. She and it had had a temperamental relationship at best in the Modern Languages department, in Swallowgate days. Mara had used to say it was because she had found a language as ambitious as she was. Poppy's word had been 'vibrant.' Faith looked again at the mangle of the boy's hands and was surprised to find she wished not at all for those days – for the battling with strong and weak verb stems. She missed Swallowgate like a heart, but her subject…well, it all seemed rather pointless now, between the maimed hands of this nameless boy and the fact that not one of the languages they had had her undertake was advancing his cause a wit.

Faith gave up on explanations. Instead she turned to Lili and said 'Tell me someone got to us with something _useful_.'

Lili hummed. She knelt and peered herself at the hands, never quite touching them, her own hands hovering instead over them as if seeking warmth from a fire. She said to them, 'I don't think…we can't have ether for this.'

'No,' said Faith, who hadn't failed to notice the _we_. She looked again at Lili, wide-eyed and waif-like under her uniform, and raised a golden eyebrow in inquiry.

'Well you can't do _this_ ,' with a gesture at the hands, 'on your own,' she said, which Faith mentally translated as _we have nothing else to give him; I will hold him and you will set his bones_. Along the back of her neck, hairs stood to attention and her spine prickled. A sensation like ice penetrated her bones and Faith was reasonably sure that the sluggishness she felt was less sleep deprivation after hours of active service, more her blood running cold.

'Right,' she said to Lili, not arguing. 'Just here, I think,' and she shepherded them, the boy and his spokesman, to a station reserved for minor injuries. It was a dubious place to put him, she thought, with another glance for his bloodied and battered hands, but then, he could sit up, which was more than so many of them could.

Lili got behind him, her fine-boned, even delicate hands coming to rest on his shoulders. She was the last person Faith would ever have pictured for a nurse – almost like one of the Swallowgate shepherdesses in her seeming fragility, and yet Faith couldn't imagine doing without her. Now those slender fingers gave the boy's shoulders a squeeze in sympathy and Faith sent up a prayer that as yet, she had never had to. _I had a little shadow_ , she thought inconsequentially, driven to it, no doubt, by the childish mould of her friend's hands, _that goes in and out with me_ …She was smiling as she knelt down beside the young man and his hands. Cautiously she took one and encased it in hers.

'This will hurt,' she said, and refrained from adding _only a little_. Whether or not he understood, she imagined her face was presently betraying the falseness of this in any case. A look from Lili, a half-smile tucked into the corner of her mouth, confirmed this. Moving like molasses in January, she began to unfold the fingers from his palm. Still he cried out, as Faith endeavoured to lay them flat, naming them as she did so, _proximal phalanx, metacarpal phalanx, distal phalanx…_ Telling them as Mara had used to tell beads on white nights. They even clacked in the same way. It set Faith's teeth on edge, and the prickling that had heretofore restricted itself to her neck and spine ran giddily down her arms. _Oh God_ , she thought, and realised only belatedly that she had said it aloud when she caught Lili's smile, her perpetual surprise that a minister's daughter should say anything of such mixed reverence as this invocation of her Creator. The boy at her elbow – with the English to make petitions – understood better, Faith thought. How many nights, she wondered, had it taken him before he had realised there was no prayer more urgent than this one?

 _Metacarpal joint, interphalangeal joint, sesamoid bones…What,_ in the name of God, had happened to him? She began clumsily to reach for her Swallowgate inheritance, the hopelessly insubstantial Gaelic she had caught off of her friends, but of course it was woefully short, and anyway, she knew now why he didn't understand. She was assessing the damage to the trapezium when he cried out in earnest, and in another life, Faith would have understood him. Of course, in another life, no one would have declined to teach her German because of the ongoing war, and had they not done that she would not be here, and neither would he, and it would all be a moot point. As it was, she had heard just enough in her time abroad to know a boy's cry for his mother, whatever the language. She thought her face must certainly have betrayed her. Lili's _had_ – Lili with her heart like the soft centre of a fondant, looking beyond incredulous.

'Please, Miss,' said the young man at Lili's elbow to Faith again, but Faith could only nod. She had his blood all over her hands and a piece of his wrist between her fingers. Whatever she did, she absolutely could not send him back out into the world with hands like bear-claws. It was lunacy, was even senseless, and later on she would write it in a letter to Jem, certain that if anyone in the world understood the mechanism that moved her, he would. _I swore it to myself on the boat coming over,_ she would say to him, _First, do no harm – and all the rest. And having done that, how could I_ _not_ _?_

'Lili,' she said now, 'give him something to bite, can you?' and to the boy at her side, whitely grateful, 'Can you give that to me? I want to try a splint.'

She nodded in the direction of the things she meant, her own hands being impossibly enmeshed in the German youth's. 'You don't,' she said, accepting the splint, 'happen to have a name for him?'

'He was dying,' said the boy, though in fact, Faith thought this was probably not true. Ruined hands or not, and allowing for shock, the pulse she could feel at the base of his wrist was good. There was no need to say this. It had nothing to do with the point.

'What about you?' she asked instead. 'I can't work with only a pronoun.'

That won a smile from him, the kind that showed his teeth – white as milk teeth against all odds. How long had he been over here?

'Travers, Miss. Derwent Travers, Private.'

Faith smiled, and he must have taken it for recognition of some reference, because he said, 'Mum had a taste for Coleridge.'

 _Nan_ , thought Faith, _would have made that leap_. Aloud she said, 'Of course. George Herbert was mother's favourite.' Which he had been. Faith could still see her framed print of _Easter Wings_ in her mind's eye. _Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store/ who foolishly he lost the same…_ Strange, the things one remembered.

She couldn't save his index finger. This was becoming rapidly apparent. It was missing the shaft of the proximal phalange and the base of the middle phalange. The air was thick with the smell of blood, and the wrack of the boy's suffering. Faith looked at Lili, a wild, desperate petition. _What do we do?_ She was not sure that heretofore she had had to splint anything quite like this. She could leave it, of course, but then the finger would be useless to him. It was going to be beyond useless anyway. And there was only so much time available. He wasn't the only boy in the world to need ministering to, and anyway, there were limits to what one could do before shock became too severe.

Faith gave up on the index finger. She would have liked to have persevered it, the flexibility and dexterity of it for the hand, but there it was. Much like social niceties, wishes and their fulfilment had also fallen by the wayside. She looked against to Travers. He said, 'What can I do?' and then proceeded to hand her to tools she needed for the restoration of the German's middle finger.

'They'll send him home,' said Lili, to no one in particular.

'Thank _God_ ,' said Travers, with sufficient feeling that Lili's already raised eyebrows soared to new heights. Faith thought she understood it. She couldn't have killed this boy either, not after this.

He was going to have a preternaturally short little finger; the head of the bone there was shattered irreparably. Faith fished pieces of it out of his palm with a thought for the stigma she had heard visiting preachers to the university chapel describe. _Of all the unlikely places to find one_ , she thought, and then filed it away to write to her father, as soon as she got the chance for a letter. He couldn't use it in a sermon, of course – too staunchly Presbyterian, the pair of them, for that – but he'd like the idea.

The bone of the ring finger was sticking out at a jaunty angle. At least, half of it was. Faith had lost track by now of which piece of what bone it was, because her own fingers were slippery with blood, his hands white with blood loss, and stippled in the blood that had eluded her hands. Muscles gleamed, raw and exposed in the imperfect light, things that Faith had before only read, now made flesh. So many pieces, and all unseeing to make the whole – and all so finely wrought. She had never seen anything quite like it. Had never worked quite so closely on a patient either, even under ether, even when operating. Gingerly, warily, she tried to straighten the finger, and he screamed. Lili, blue-lipped, gave his shoulders a squeeze, hard, but not ungentle. Faith felt the tremor of it as it reverberated through his body on the heels of the scream.

'I've got him,' said Lili, gently. 'You do that again. It's almost there.'

'Can I…'offered Travers, uncertain.

Faith almost said _Hold his hand_ , the thing she said to every other Travers she had encountered. Instead she said, 'Hold the top of the ring finger. Just there. It will keep it in place when I…' there was no need for him to have all the gory detail. She stopped, and Travers took the bloodied pad of the boy's finger between his own thumb and index finger. _Digitus Cordis_ , she recalled Jem naming it as he placed his mother's circlet of pearls on her finger. The boy's teeth scraped against the leather he had given him, and he squirmed under Lili's hands, slender but improbably strong. Over it all Faith splinted the shaft of the bone to the base of another. That grated too, scraped like his teeth had done, resisting Faith's best efforts at mending. It seemed an age before the pieces clicked together, held by the weave of her fingers and sutures. The finger was never going to be the same, it would always be stiff, but it was _whole_.

Sweat prickled at Faith's forehead. She thought vaguely of chasing it away, recalled the blood of her hands, recalled that her hands were needed for more pressing causes, and left it to run its course. It slipped, fine and damp down her forehead, dampening her hair and worsening the gooseflesh of her skin.

That still left the other hand. With as much gentleness and precision as was reasonably compatible, Faith eased the shrapnel of from it, feeling for the pieces of bone as she went. Here knitting shaft to base, there joining what should never have joined in the first place, because there was no alternative and she hadn't the time to be fussy. _Please God, let him not have been a carpenter_ , she thought, as his hands came together under hers. He couldn't lay them flat. Some of that, Faith realised, was the splint. Some of it was the fact that she was operating on a wakeful patient, with no very precise means of doing her work, and a decided lack of experience. Though after this, any surgery she performed on a hand was going to look like a work of art by comparison, she was sure. Of course, if she ever saw hands quite like this again, then there was something terribly wrong with the world. There was something terribly wrong with the world anyway.

To Travers she said, 'Do you know what happened?'

'Dunno,' he said. 'He was under a cart when I found him, and I guess that did for his hands. I didn't think to ask, and when I did, of course…' he shrugged. By then he must have realised it wasn't one of his troupe he was helping. 'I couldn't _stop_ ,' he said, before Faith could ask. She shook her head. 'No,' she said, 'of course not.'

She had finished with the hands. Now they lay before her, imperfect, and still clawed, but not so tight as before. More like hands, less like paws. They would unfurl in time, if he worked on them, could she but find a way to tell him what to do.

Lili was looking at her, eyes gentle and apologetic, _There is no more time_. There wasn't. Faith washed the blood from their assorted hands, the smell of carbolic lotion a welcome change after the endless coppery tang of blood. If she could get him to his own doctor, this nameless, maimed boy…

'Please, Miss.'

Faith looked at Travers and said, 'See him safe?'

'Of course, Miss.'

It was all she could do. Faith watched them go, arms linked, and hoped it was enough.


	6. Chapter 6

_With love, as ever, and gratitude to you intrepid readers. There's no getting around this one, so fair warning; if you're squeamish about eyes, this is probably not your chapter, as there's rather a lot of them here._

* * *

They had bandaged his eyes. It struck Faith at once, as if someone had begun the process of mummification and then changed their mind midway through the encasing. It went a long way to explaining why he didn't register her presence at once, his eyes – Mummy's eyes – encased in linen like that. When he did, Carl shot bolt upright and said, 'What on _earth_ are you doing here? How did you get away? What did you tell them?' and flung his arms tight around her neck in childish excitement. It made Faith think suddenly of Christmas mornings, exchanging gifts after the service, the way his boyish hands would come around her neck as the jubilant exclamation 'Thank you ever so much!' collided with her eardrum. But for the bandaging on his eyes and the smell of hospital and fever, it was almost the same.

She wished she could see his eyes. She knew how they should have looked, star-bright and blue as irises. Would they still be? Gingerly she brought one hand to the side of his face and traced the seams of the bandage.

'How did you do it?' he repeated, unbelieving. Resisting the temptation to jab his fingers into her palms and prove her existence there in the hospital ward, Faith grinned, recalled he couldn't see her and said, 'What do you mean, how did I do it? I happened to get a bit of leave, so I walked in here, said Matron had sent me to check on Thomas Carlyle Meredith's progress, and no one so much as blinked.'

' 'Course not,' said Carl contentedly into her nurse's cape, 'Can't have, if you said it like that.'

She felt, rather than saw his grin as it flashed against the side of her neck. Thereafter he fell helpless and laughing among his pillows. She should tell him to stop; if that didn't draw attention to them, Faith didn't know what would. On the other hand, he was laughing as he had Before the War, and just then, that counted for more with Faith than the curious glances of other sisters. Let him laugh. His eyes would be sparkling with it. Or that was the theory. She still needed to see them.

'Fools and infants,' said Carl now into his pillows, voice muffled, ' – only people in the world that would argue with you in a mood like that.'

'If you say so,' said Faith, and began to undo the bandages. Carl came upright like a shot. The back of his head all but collided with her nose. Faith affected not to notice.

'What,' Carl said, incredulous, 'are you _doing_?'

'My job, you goose,' Faith said, still unwinding the bandaging.

Carl was nonplussed. He said, 'Supposing someone comes back here to see how I'm getting on?'

'Then I'll explain that you're being exceptionally difficult. Possibly I'll ask if that's always the case. Unless you've lost your character along with your eye, I seriously doubt the sisters are going to argue the point. Now.'

She had all but undone the bandage. Carl's hand closed in a vice over hers, his knuckles standing to white attention. 'It's not…nice,' he said.

'You think I deal in _niceties_?' said Faith, incredulous in her turn. She was possessed suddenly, keenly, of a desire to laugh. Only by then she had the length of the linen bandage in her hand and Carl's eyes before her, and she felt laughter go out of her like a breath. _It's not nice_ he had said. Quite.

The left eye was bloodied and red. Faith had expected that. _Subconjunctival Haemorrhage_ , Faith thought, fingers carefully tracing the outside of the eye. The skin was swollen to the touch, and cool in a combination that subjected a coloured blancmange. At some point the eye had ruptured, leaving the sclera like a wizened rubber balloon. Only rubber balloons didn't bleed this much. Warily, Faith risked a look at the irises. Still that clear, brook blue colour of childhood – of Mummy's eyes, or trying to be. _Thank God_ , she thought, grateful that after all, she could put this into a letter to their father at least. She wouldn't mention the exposed tear ducts or the way the left eye was swamped in red, one of those blue relics marred almost to a bruise.

'It's not very bad,' said Carl. 'A bit like looking in a camera box. All light and dark, you know?' Faith had no idea, having been disinclined to stand still for photographs, much less take them. She must have looked this; Carl grinned and said, 'Anyway, it's the other eye that's sore.'

With difficulty Faith looked away from the ruin of her brother's left eye and redirected her attention to its double. 'Hurts where?'

'That wasn't your cue.'

'I was sent to see how you were getting on,' said Faith, 'remember?'

Lightly she began to sketch the outside of his eye with her fingers, Carl's protests notwithstanding. There was swelling there too, around the eyelids, leaving it puffy and red. Blood in the white of the eye too, but more, Faith thought from burst blood vessels than more severe trauma.

'You can see out of it all right?' she asked and Carl nodded, dodging and weaving away from her fingers in the process.

'It's _behind_ ,' he said, 'that it's sore. Like someone's put it in a vice.'

Experimentally, Faith tilted his head backwards. Carl made a disgruntled noise, but it being more brotherly irritation than pain, she ignored him. Nothing happened to the eye. Still with his chin in her hand, she tilted his head from side to side. Still no movement. 'You told the nurses about this, did you?' said Faith. Carl made a noise that might have been anything, but that sounded to Faith like negation.

'I thought it would go away,' he said, and then tried to dodge again as Faith attempted to press a finger to his eye. In spite of the frantic fluttering of his eyelids like moths, there was no getting around the dryness of it.

'You thought it would go away,' echoed Faith. Carl, succeeding at last at escaping her grasp on his chin, nodded vigorously. 'You know,' he said, 'the way a black eye goes down after a day or two.'

'Mhm,' said Faith, so that Carl squirmed under the hospital corners of the English cotton sheets encasing him.

'You, er, don't think it's that?'

'No,' said Faith. There was a sliver of a crack along the edge of the socket, so fine as to be almost a wrinkle, but with none of the softness. If she tilted Carl's head just right in the light, Faith could see the sliver of fine white bone looming beneath it. She supposed the concern at the time had been all for the ruptured eye, and no wonder. It certainly _looked_ dire. Nor was it impossible the swelling of the skin had obscured the crack even a day or two ago. Now she took Carl's chin in hand again, and said belatedly, 'Mind if I look?'

Already she had stretched the eye wide, the better to look at it. He could see, so not a trapped nerve then. But perhaps a muscle…just at the edge, where the bone had splintered. 'I don't think,' she said now, her fingers prodding the fault line of the bone, 'this is going to be especially comfortable.'

'Sorry,' said Carl, voice taut, 'what exactly are you doing?'

'I think,' said Faith, 'I'm freeing a muscle.'

'You _think_?'

'Don't move,' said Faith, apparently necessarily, as Carl attempted to do exactly this, his head lurching in credible imitation of a cat that finds its head unwillingly in a vice. 'I can't get a hold of your eyeball if you do that.'

' _Eyeball_?' said Carl, horrified. Briefly, Faith considered enumerating the finer points of what it was she was trying to do to him. Of all her siblings, he was the least likely to be squeamish about things like pinched muscles. On the other hand, best not. It was hard enough on her, with his eyeball between her fingers, slippery with the dammed fluid lodged behind it. But if she had to explain it to Carl...Faith felt her throat clench like a fist. No, much better he know nothing of snared muscles and cracked bones, Faith thought.

'Sit still, will you?' she said in the end, in her best imitation of Matron. It must have been sufficient for Carl to forget it was her bent over him and not one of the other nurses, because he sat to attention, shoulders stiffly straight. Someone approached with an offer of help and Faith sent her for tweezers. Under her hands she felt Carl's eyes trying to widen.

' _What,_ ' he said, in a voice like a bowstring, 'are you doing?'

'Seeing if I can't make the aching stop a bit,' said Faith, hoping she sounded sure. She had not thought what it would mean, to stand over Carl like this, her fingers encased between his eyelids, not older sister but doctor. It made her stomach tense and spasm in a pale imitation of the eye under her care, but there was no time for nerves. The nurse had bobbed back into existence, tweezers in hand. 'Thank you,' said Faith to her, and was surprised to hear she could say it evenly. Tweezers in one hand and eye on the other, Faith made a start on the muscle.

The first attempt went badly. The eyeball slipped from between her fingers before she could pull the muscle free. Her fingers were slippery now and cold with blood and aqueous fluid, and it made recapturing the eyeball difficult. It was wedged tightly into the socket, and while it wasn't _moving_ , it was undeniably sleek with newly liberated aqueous fluid. A spurt of it shot over Faith's fingers, warm and wet, and she became aware of her heartbeat, heightened with nerves and operation, discernible in her chest, her neck, her wrists, her thumbs.

The other nurse was by then watching, fascinated. Idly, it occurred to Faith to wonder what her name was.

'Can I help at all?'

Faith shook her head, _No_ , the bulk of her attention on the elusive eyeball. Threading a needle, she thought, must surely be easier, and how often had she handed _that_ task off to one or another of the girls who pinned hopes? By the time she had departed Swallowgate, Poppy had undertaken to thread them all unasked. But then fingers closed around the eyeball and she looked up long enough to offer whoever-it-was a smile.

'It's fiddly,' said Faith, as she took the trapped muscle between the tweezers and made to tug it free. No luck. The eyeball rolled free of her fingers again, and she cursed softly, starting the nurse and making Carl laugh.

'A case of too many cooks?' offered the hovering nurse.

'Something like that.'

By this time Carl's eye was actively trying to drive her fingers out from the socket, spasmodically twitching around her. And while he didn't say, Faith had the distinct impression this was far from helping his discomfort.

'One more try,' she said to him. 'Then we'll call it a day.'

'Shall I…' uncertainly the other nurse set her hands over the eyelids. That helped. It was one less thing to contend with as Faith's fingers reached for the eyeball. It rolled away, away again, and then came up against her fingers, moist with fluid, warm from handling, and slippery as an otter. She held it gingerly, mindful of that sacred, unmarred iris like a cornflower. They must preserve that at least. Mummy's eyes. If only so that she could write to her father that whatever their losses, that at least was not numbered among them. With great effort she took hold of the silvery thread of the muscle and eased it free. Carl made another indeterminate noise, but it seemed this time to be as much relief as it was hurt. Faith took her fingers away from his good eye and looked at it. Glistering with moisture, puffed and bruised around the edge, but blue as an English bluebell at the iris. The sight of it made her want to cry. Faith thought, as relief washed over her in terrible, palpable, unplumbable waves, that she might.

The nurse saved her. She said, 'Will saline be viscous enough to treat it, do you think?'

Faith considered this, the worst of her overwrought nerves abating in the face of a practical querry. It out to be more resinous, she thought – sticky even. Incongruously her brain conjured the honey beloved of little Bruce and wanted to laugh. As if they had copious amounts of the stuff going spare in the face of rationing.

'Yes,' she heard herself say, 'yes, saline should be fine.'

Between them, Faith and the unnamed nurse, they washed the eye and rewound the bandages. Said the nurse, quite needlessly, 'We didn't realise about the right eye. They all came in at once you know, and there wasn't time…'

'There never is,' said Faith. The ordeal over, she felt suddenly exhausted, her attention retreating strategically from this particular battlefield. _Never again_ , said some internal voice. _Not Carl, or Una or any of them – do you understand? Never again_. Faith looked at Carl with his newly mummified eyes and was disinclined to argue the point. She could still feel the ghost of Carl's eye, slick and watery between her fingers, the tremor of his eyelids where they had convulsed around her knuckles. She had done many hard things, Faith thought, but none had been so hard as this – as ministering to little Carl with his bruised blue eyes.

She must have looked as she felt. The nurse said, 'Favourite of yours?' and Faith clutched at this explanation gratefully. It was even true – Carl _was_ her favourite of them, had been ever since she had undertaken his safekeeping back in those sombre Maywater days after Mummy.

It was a relief to retreat to the chair by the bedside while the nurse fetched tea, the white crispness of her rustling and billowing as a flag.

'Thank God _that's_ over,' said Carl for both of them, and grinned the grin of a Cheshire Cat that had no business on his face. Faith could imagine all too plainly how his eyes must be crinkling and creasing beneath the bandages.

Over cups of watery tea, Faith said, 'Never do anything like that again.'

'Wouldn't dream of it,' said Carl. He gave her another Cheshire Cat grin. Faith considered hitting him upside the head. Then she recalled the damage to his eye, spared a thought for his optic nerve changed her mind. 'Aside from anything else,' said Carl, 'there's only so much of this,' brandishing his mug of weak tea aloft, 'I can stand. You've spoiled me for tarry stuff.'

Faith _did_ hit him then, on his shoulder, where there was no chance of further abusing his eyes. Mummy's eyes. With their lovely, Maywater blue. Carl did not care; he collapsed, laughing among the pillows, where his shoulders rose and fell with unsupressable mirth.

 _So much for never again_ , Faith thought, watching him. She ought to stop him, but no - he was laughing as he hadn't since the war had started, or not that she had seen anyway. If she could give that back to him, the lightness and the laughter - the lustrous sparkle of those eyes like blue Spode, well that was worth it. Butterfly-strokes of his eyelids at her knuckles, the snakelike writing of her stomach...it was all worth it if she could keep Carl — all of them —in laughter. That, if nothing else, was worth fighting for.


	7. Chapter 7

_Normally I'd let this story sit for days, or months, but this must be one of the first chapters I ever wrote, even before I was sure I'd share it, and I'm ready to call this piece finished. To all of you who have read, reviewed, followed, favourited and generally braved this story, many times thank you. I know it hasn't always been easy reading, but I've loved having you along for the ride._

* * *

 _Beware of heliotrope cyanosis_ Faith wrote to the girls at Swallowgate, and then wondered if they knew what it meant. She must have wondered aloud, because Lili said, 'They'll know if they've seen it' and suddenly Faith hoped fervently that they _didn't_ –wouldn't –know, because if they did then they knew the horrors that preceded it. No, she preferred to imagine them reading this letter and asking equal parts amused and exasperated, _Why can't Faith write letters in English_? She could bear that. The thought that they had witnessed their own private Gethsemanes of blue and blood –that was unthinkable. She almost struck it out, and yet, it was better than some of the alternatives. _Beware heliotrope cyanosis_.

It had started like especially virulent flu, all the usual symptoms. That was before heliotrope cyanosis, back when people were still mostly recovering from it. Spring, Faith thought, that was in the spring; she knew this because the lavender was in bloom, such a pretty shade of purple, such a striking and unexpected burst of colour in a world that had grown small and drab. She used to pluck sprigs of it and carry them in her sleeve pocket to rub on her hands in-between patients, so that she wouldn't go to them smelling of fever and carbolic lotion, she had said when Dr. Christopherson asked.

It was autumn now, the lavender long gone, though she still had a stash of it, dried and preserved in a hastily made pillow. She dipped into it as needed to expunge the fever-sickness-and-lotion smell of her work. It had no colour, but that didn't matter, it was the scent she was after, clean and fresh. Besides, she could still picture it to the shade as she drifted off to sleep. Often she did.

They had run out of coffins. That was today's revelation. They had run out of coffins and the dead were to be laid on cedar planks along the halls of the morgue; this instruction re-laid grimly by Dr. Christopherson over the body of Lietenant Matthews, blood still seeping from his right ear, having missed the memo that the rest of his body had given up the battle. Faith nodded and moved down the row to Private Gregory. He was breathing so heavily she could hear the mucous rale even without putting her ear to his chest. Nothing to do about the mucous rale, but she changed the cold compress on his forehead where it had become fever-warm. If she could starve off the fever in Gregory then perhaps he would be spared the blossoming of damask roses on the cheeks, the blue skin. In a season where the dead were like the descendants of Abraham and more numerous than the stars, that would be a small but decisive victory. Gregory said something that might have been English, but was rendered incomprehensible by the fever-dream of the moment. And then he began to bleed at the mouth and the breath Faith had been inhaling came out in a premature _swoosh_ of frustration. The blood foamed and bubbled, and Faith swept it away with the corner of an exhausted cloth. Someone –Lili she thought –put a hand to her shoulder. _You can't do anything now_. No, but she could bear witness. Someone, after all, owed Gregory's family an account of his death. She watched the death-roses blossom on his face and was ambushed suddenly by a story Jem had once told her at the height of his preoccupation with the Indian people. It had been years ago, and of course the conversational track that had lead them there was now lost in the quagmires of time, but she could still recall the awe in his voice as he told her of the tradition of the death song, sung by the braves as they died. Sometimes these were sung in feats of defiance, inspired by horror and tribulation, sometimes subdued and quiet on the last of their breath. When you couldn't sing your own death song, Faith recalled him saying, it was sung for you. Well, she could do that for Gregory, could take the story of his death and his bravery forward with her into whatever world was coming. Someone had to.

It took mere hours, the roses darkening almost to black on his cheeks where they stood out like cankers against the china-blue of his skin. He had been porcelain-white once and frosted with cold, but even then he had looked alive. Faith ground a bit of lavender between thumb and forefinger, scored her palms with it and scattered the remnants over his weakened chest.

'A reminder of spring for you,' she said, and walked down the row.

New patients had come in, she discovered, and were now lying on hastily-made palettes on the floor, placed in-between the cots. She had to walk along the ends of the beds to avoid stepping on them, and it occurred to Faith to wonder how long it would be before even that sliver of space too was yielded up to the dying.

'A story as old as time, almost,' said Dr. Christopherson, recalling her, 'no room at the inn.'

'Wouldn't be much point even if there was,' said Faith, 'packed like sardines –the doctors will be coming down with it next.' Because of course, she thought as she accepted his smile and the fresh washcloth to go with the new patient, they were talking about the hospitals. There had never been any doubt. It had only been a matter of time before word went out, _we have no room, there is no space left_. She thought of the froth and foam, the waste of the fever's last stages and felt certain they would all have died of it months ago themselves but for the fact they were still operating from a tent on the fringes of civilization, the fresh air creeping under the canvas to dilute the stifling combination of fever, waste, and summer heat. Elsewhere she knew fresh air was discouraged, _Stay indoors_ having become the order of the day. Faith thought whoever had issued this edict had never seen death face to face, because so far as she was concerned the air admitted by the crevices of the canvas tent smelled of the longevity and tenacity of life, of the fireweed and garlic mustard, of mulching leaves, wet and musty with decomposition, the dying gasp of the lilacs. She breathed deeply through her nose and caught a hint of the lavender in her pocket over the blood-and-waste smell that hovered over her patient. No, a person could choke on sickness just as surely as they could on mustard gas, and from the sluggish sound of Lieutenant McDowell's breathing, he knew it to.

Under her fingers McDowell's body spasmed again, blood weeping gently from the corner of his mouth. It looked like a stray thread someone had forgotten to cut at the seam between lip and skin. She brought the washcloth back and daubed it away. _Good as new_.

He was the colour of spoiled milk by the evening, a blue so delicate it looked almost white in the moonlight.

'If there are no coffins,' said Faith as she dressed him for burial, 'what are we to do with the bodies?'

'We bury them as we can,' said Dr. Christopherson. 'I'm sorry, it's not really –'

'A lass's work. I know. But it's not really a doctor's work either. Ideally they die cleanly, with family around them for comfort and you don't have it on your conscience that your best effort wasn't enough.'

Dr. Christopherson clapped a hand onto her shoulder and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. 'We'll make a doctor of you yet,' he said.

They dug the grave deep because the dead were legion. It was heavy work and it split Faith's hands open in places she hadn't realised were vulnerable, exhausted muscles she had previously seen only under the operating knife. When she crushed a sprig of lavender against her hands to remove the smell of death and burial, the granules stung her raw skin. Still, they managed. Then Lili complained of cold.

'That happens sometimes,' said Dr. Christopherson, 'after you've been doing warm work in the cool of the evening a long time.'

'He's not wrong,' said Faith, trying to match his lightness. She had seen Jem slave away over chores in the sun before now, splitting the wood for a campfire, or gamely helping Miller Douglas to build hayricks in the August sun, often stripped down to his trousers in warm weather, his body beaded with sweat. This wasn't like that; Lili hugged her arms tight to her torso, eyes glassy in the moonlight and they all three chose to take this double diagnosis as Gospel, even though of course it wasn't. When the cold turned into chills, Faith gave Lili her blanket ('I don't need it, you do') and made no mention of the mugginess of the evening.

'It will pass,' said Faith in the morning when Lili complained of a headache. They were severely short of doctors by then, but no one pressed her into service. Instead, Faith brewed her a cup of tea made from feverfew and willow bark feeling ridiculously superstitious. It didn't stop her sending a prayer up on the wing of an ascending lark for the stuff's efficacy though, because so far she had still been denied that small victory against the flu. Though of course, Lili only had a headache.

It had blossomed into full-fledged fever by the evening, and Faith lost sleep hunting out what blankets hadn't been burnt as carriers of the sickness in an effort to sweat it out of her. Dr Christopherson found her among the linens, his own blanket draped over his arms.

'It's Indian summer,' he said, 'I'll do fine without it.' Faith wanted to cry. Instead she let him pull her tightly into a hug, breathing in the sunlight and wool smell of him that was so refreshing after the close-clinging smell of the fever and alcoholic rinse.

'Nothing so frustrating as uselessness,' he said sympathetically, smoothing her hair. 'And God knows this illness has made the lot of us damn near redundant.'

Faith waited for him to apologise for the oversight of swearing in front of one of his girls and when it didn't come she wanted to weep all over again for the loss of the old-world idealist whose stubborn chivalry had seen her through so much.

'What do I do?' asked Faith, tilting her head to look up at him. She was trying to catch a glimpse of his old self, of the man who said over the operating table _It's_ _not really a lass's work_ as she handed him cauterising irons and bone saws. She found it in his eyes, blue as scilla and level as they gazed down at her. He gave her shoulders another squeeze for good measure.

'What you can,' said Dr. Christopherson. 'You do what you can. What you must.'

Sometime towards dawn the blood began to bubble at Lili's mouth, and Faith blotted it away before it could come to full flower. She tried to sit Lili up, worried she would choke on the blood, but of course she was too crippled with illness to manage it. She shrivelled under the blankets and clutched at Faith's hand with terrifying tenacity.

'Promise me something?' said Lili from the depths of her blankets.

'Anything.' It was a powerful promise to make, a terrible one.

'Don't be a martyr to me. If the blue death comes let me die of it alone.'

'I can't do that.'

'You must. You promised anything. One of us must keep the memory alive.'

 _Memory of what?_ Faith wondered as the sun streaked grimly over the horizon. Of the blood, the mud, the agony of the men she had nursed? Or of the pointlessness of the flu, the bodies unrecognisable in their death-throe blueness, lying out on the floor because they had run out of coffins and the hospitals were overflowing? Perhaps it wouldn't come to that though. Perhaps Lili would overcome whatever the virulent virus was and they would have this in common, an especially gruesome _Do you remember_ to reminisce over in after years. She was still cherishing a hope of that one small victory. _I did not_ , Faith argued with her God in the dark hour before dawn, _come all this way to watch men and boys and nurses die of some idiotic flu_. It wasn't idiotic though, and in calmer moments, Faith caught glimpses of what she thought must be pneumonia, because it fit with her memories of the wracking strain of it little Carl had suffered all those years ago from sitting out in the Methodist graveyard overnight. But to say that aloud was to give Lili up to the dead, and she couldn't do that.

It got into Lili's lungs, of course. Faith had known it would from the moment the blood bloomed at her mouth. She suspected they both had. At first it was only a shadow, a stutter in her breathing like a leaf on the wind, and Faith had to press her ear to Lili's chest to hear it. But then it rose, a skeletal rattle that seeped into her breathing, made it slow and heavy as molasses.

Then it came, creeping with a cat's grace, a beautiful colouration, the very colour of lavender. Lili wore it beautifully.

'Heliotrope cyanosis,' said Dr. Christopherson for all of them, although it didn't matter; Lili was beyond understanding and they didn't need the telling. 'An especially virulent strain. You'll want to stay of course.'

'I promised,' said Faith. 'I promised her anything –promised I wouldn't.'

'Brave, clever girl,' he said. 'The world can't afford to lose you to influenza. Much too much work still to do, lives to save.'

'It isn't really a lass's work though,' said Faith, striving to smile for them both. For all her sins she had never been one to break a promise. She thought this one to Lili might just be the first.

'No,' said Dr. Christopherson, 'it's not. But it's a doctor's work, and unless I'm very much mistaken, you _are_ a doctor.'

 _Fin._

* * *

 _Well, there you are - the end I could never take back once I'd seen it, and that catapulted me into what became Love, Laughter and Tenderness_. _Thank you again for reading. I can't tell you what it's meant having you follow me along through gangrene and flies and all manner of horrors. I'll try and make the next story lighter, shall I?_


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